• Hai-Jun Liu,Xiaqing Wang,Yingjie Xiao,Jingyun Luo,Feng Qiao,Wenyu Yang,Ruyang Zhang,Yijiang Meng,Jiamin Sun,Shijuan Yan,Yong Peng,Luyao Niu,Liumei Jian,Wei Song,Jiali Yan,Chunhui Li,Yanxin Zhao,Ya Liu,Marilyn L. Warburton,Jiuran Zhao &Jianbing Yan

Genome Biology volume 21, Article number: 20 (2020)

Background

Identifying genotype-phenotype links and causative genes from quantitative trait loci (QTL) is challenging for complex agronomically important traits. To accelerate maize gene discovery and breeding, we present the Complete-diallel design plus Unbalanced Breeding-like Inter-Cross (CUBIC) population, consisting of 1404 individuals created by extensively inter-crossing 24 widely used Chinese maize founders.

Results

Hundreds of QTL for 23 agronomic traits are uncovered with 14 million high-quality SNPs and a high-resolution identity-by-descent map, which account for an average of 75% of the heritability for each trait. We find epistasis contributes to phenotypic variance widely. Integrative cross-population analysis and cross-omics mapping allow effective and rapid discovery of underlying genes, validated here with a case study on leaf width.

Conclusions

Through the integration of experimental genetics and genomics, our study provides useful resources and gene mining strategies to explore complex quantitative traits.

全文链接：https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-020-1930-x